An open collection of baseball's little-known records and curiosities.

"He would have been among the league leaders in batting average for a majority of the season had he had enough plate appearances." -- 2008 St. Louis Cardinals Media Guide about non-roster invitee Mark Johnson

Sunday, June 7, 2009

2009 Team Unearned Runs

On Friday I cross-posted something I wrote for Brew Crew Ball regarding earned and unearned runs in an inning with errors and pitching changes. One of the topics that came up was team unearned runs.

When pitchers are changed during an inning, the relief pitcher shall not have the benefit of previous chances for outs not accepted in determining earned runs.

You can read my Friday post for an example of this rule being applied. Team unearned runs come into play if a reliever allows earned (to him) runs to score after the team should have been out of the inning. They're relatively rare, since errors, pitching changes, and ineffective relief pitching all have to present for one to result.

Team unearned runs can have an effect on baseball statistics, though. Since they are charged as earned runs to relief pitchers but unearned runs to the team, summing up earned runs allowed by a team's pitchers can make a team's ERA look higher than it should. Baseball-Reference.com calculates team ER and team ERA by summing the earned runs allowed of the team's pitchers, so that's at least one often-used site that can be off. As noted Friday, Cleveland is one example of this. Unfortunately, there are ten other teams in the same boat through June 6.

This is further notable because of an error in the Baseball-Reference box score/play-by-play. Bailey entered the game due to injury with a 2-0 count on Michael Young. The box score/play-by-play lists Young's walk (and later run) as belonging to Bailey when in fact it should belong to Anderson per Official Rule 10.16(h). Curiously, the walk and run do not count against his total on his player page but they are still there in his game log.

Obviously the difference will mean less as the season goes on. Where one team unearned run might cause a difference of 0.02 in a team's ERA now, it might not cause an apparent difference in a team's ERA at the end of the season. However, that's no reason to ignore the fact there is a difference. Who knows, maybe those eight team unearned runs will be the difference between Detroit finishing first, second, or third in the team ERA standings.